7 ms·

I'm still wondering why the Amiga didn't become ubiquitous. I had one and I kept getting called a liar about its price - for the performance compared to PCs of

I'm still wondering why the Amiga didn't become ubiquitous. I had one and I kept getting called a liar about its price - for the performance compared to PCs of the time, surely I omitted a zero.

ido 12y ago
Some of it is in the article. Like Atari with the ST, Commodore basically failed to capitalize on the original amiga and by the early 90s PCs have mostly caught up. While the amiga 1000 was revolutionary in 1985, AGA[1] was not that special in 1992 (especially as it wasn't particularly beneficial to 3d games like doom, which were becoming the new hotstuff). The amiga of the 90s was the 3dfx voodoo. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Advanced_Graphics_Architecture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Advanced_Graphics_Archite...
- Gracana 12y ago
  If anyone is interested, Stuart Brown's "Doomed: The Embers of Amiga FPS" is a nice little documentary of the history mentioned above. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tv6aJRGpz_A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tv6aJRGpz_A
- cmrdporcupine 12y ago
  And frankly by the late 80s the 680000 architecture itself had hit a dead end performance wise. Maybe Motorola could have pulled off what Intel did with Pentium, paper over the aging CISC with RISC internals, but instead we got PowerPC. I'm not sure if you ever used a PowerPC Mac when they were a mix of emulated 68k and PowerPC, but they were notoriously unstable. The mix of a lack of memory protection and emulated CPU instructions would have been the same for the Amiga and Atari ST whose OSs also lacked memory protection and safety features of more modern operating systems. I have an Atari Falcon 030, Atari's last and best machine. It is a really really nice machine. But it was hobbled by poor software support -- it's only now that hackers are discovering what they can do with the combination of the 68030 and the Motorola 56k DSP in it (Example: Quake 3 has been ported/rewritten recently for it, using the 56k for 3d acceleration.) I used to wonder what the world would have been like if the 68000 systems won out. But now we're seeing a world where the ARM belatedly wins out, which is kind of neat, tho ARM is arguably now as "evil" as Intel :-) What is an interesting mental exercise is imagining what would have happened if the 6502 or 6809 architectures had expanded and done well. Those architectures had insanely fast interrupt processing and very fast (single CPU cycle) memory access. Some really neat machines could have been made if they'd continued to advance them, gotten past the 64k memory address limit and into high clock rates. Western Design stopped at the 65c816, a 16-bit variant of the 6502. Something faster and funner than the Amiga could have been built with a 32-bit 6502 descendant and chipsets similar to what was in the Amiga. That would have been really neat.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - userbinator 12y ago
    Maybe Motorola could have pulled off what Intel did with Pentium, paper over the aging CISC with RISC internals, but instead we got PowerPC. I think one of the factors could be that 68k is a bit harder to decode than x86 - while the instruction set is more orthogonal, the encoding has less structure; compare http://goldencrystal.free.fr/M68kOpcodes.pdf http://goldencrystal.free.fr/M68kOpcodes.pdf (68k) with http://i.stack.imgur.com/07zKL.png http://i.stack.imgur.com/07zKL.png (x86). very fast (single CPU cycle) memory access That was possible only because at the time, memory was faster than the core and could keep up. Modern CPUs run the core at several times memory speeds, and there is latency involved due to physical constraints.
    - digi_owl 12y ago
      Yep. The one thing Intel frets over these days is cache misses. Hyperthreading is all about keeping that pipeline busy even if the original thread encounter a cache miss.
    - ghostberry 12y ago
      One difference between Motorola and Intel, is Motorola was less concerned with breaking backwards compatibility. If the 68k family had continued to evolve past the 1994s 68060, I'm sure they could have just dropped backwards compatibility to some of the more complex addressing modes, or just devoted less silicon to them, and making what remains faster. Kinda like happened with the ColdFire version of the 68k family.
      - rbanffy 12y ago
        The not-implemented instruction trapping in the 68K could be easily evolved to cover less frequently used instructions to make room for more optimized implementations of the frequently used ones. What really killed the 68000 was the move to RISC, in particular Apple's move to PowerPC. That took away any hope of future evolution (they even managed to release the 68060 after that, but that was it) and collapsed the high-end 68K business.
- indymike 12y ago
  It's really hard to give people from this generation a sense of how fast things advanced and how big the leaps were in the 80s and early 90s. We went from 8 bit to multimedia 32 bit in less than 10 years. For devs it was a new box every year or two. Sometimes two new computers in a year. My first 386 dev box was purchased in 1987. Within a year of that, I was using a Compaq portable 386 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_Portable_386 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_Portable_386). 386 was a big deal because it finally got us Intel devs a flat address space... so no more trying to fit data into tiny pages (64k). 386 killed the chief advantage of 68k architecture, and for whatever reason Motorola just couldn't get the clock speed up fast enough. There were two things that were interesting about the Amiga in 87: video toaster for doing cheap video effects (think intro sequence to Better Call Saul, not awesome demos) and gaming. But gaming on the PC made a huge leap in 1987 when IBM shipped ALL of their new PS/2 computers with a 256 color video adapter called the VGA (seem to remember the lowest end models only doing 256 colors in 320x260 mode... but that was good enough)... Eventually TrueVision and even ATI had video cards that could do the same sorts of things (or better) than an Amiga. So many great computer ideas died in the 80s and early 90s... but it was really evolution... most of them died because a generalized solution (i.e. VGA with video out + software) eclipsed a specialized solution (i.e. Amiga with video toaster).
  - yuhong 12y ago
    AFAIK the lowest end was called MCGA.
bobochan 12y ago
The articles nails it talking about the distribution channels. The small shops that were selling Apples and Ataris refused to carry Commodore computers when they started selling VIC-20s and C-64s at big box stores like Toys R Us. When Commodore had a more powerful, and expensive, computer available, it was too expensive for those stores and they could not support it.
- digi_owl 12y ago
  Well those small shops, especially if they carried Apple, probably knew not to offend. Apple was no better to stores than MS was/is to OEMs.
  - vidarh 12y ago
    Commodore outsold Apple on the low end by a large factor for many years (and continued to do so in terms of units on a worldwide basis pretty much to the bitter end). They'd have continued to support Commodore if Commodore didn't continuously mess them around. A major factor was the price war that was to be Jack Tramiel's parting shot: Commodore overnight announced a massive price drop and left their dealers to take the hit on all inventory they already had on hand. That was typical for Tramiel playing hard-ball but also severely hurt a lot of businesses that had bet on Commodore. You see the difference when you look at the US market vs. Europe - Europe was handled by subsidiaries that often handled their dealer networks far better. Particularly the UK and Germany were Commodore strongholds. The UK subsidiary actually tried to get financing for a buyout of Commodore International after the bankruptcy, and survived for quite a while on their own financial strength.
pyb 12y ago
They did become ubiquitous, but not in the United States.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
bane 12y ago
My parents insisted on buying a PC for home use. It was mainly so they could do accounting for their business at home. I had a friend who had an Amiga and I spent pretty much as much time as possible at their house using it. We even had an Amiga only store in our local mall (in the U.S.!). I think that, in the way that Apple products are now showing up in work places due to people preferring them at home. The reverse happened in the 90s. People wanted or needed to bring work home, and their offices supplied them with PCs. The productivity situation on PCs was always just a bit better or standardized than Amigas. What mystified me more was that, during this time period, the Apple Macintosh took over the creative market -- especially in visual arts. The Amiga always came across to me as a far better creative machine, with better tooling, than the stuffier Mac. Again it may be due to better support for WYSIWYG output during printing and pre-press, better color matching etc. But the Amiga just felt more creative and fun to me. Also, by the time the 68040 came out, it was starting to become clear to everybody that Motorola wasn't going to be able to keep the performance edge up. Apple switched to PowerPC but Commodore couldn't afford to. There was a whole plethora of PowerPC cards for the Amiga, to try to keep them going, but it was really obvious by then that it was game over, and people started to hunt around for the next system.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  There never was a high volume machine that really used the '040 to its potential. The Next Cube was pretty good and there was an Alpha from DEC with it as well but that chip would have been a very nice one to have in a machine like the ST Falcon, in the end it was mostly heat (or powerconsumption if you wish) that killed it rather than that it didn't have the raw performance.
  - bane 12y ago
    You might be right. I seem to recall that right around the time Intel released the 80486 they started getting into the Mhz wars and clock multiplying the hell out of everything. DX2 then DX4. The fastest 68040 maxed out at what...40Mhz, while the 486 ended up somewhere at 150Mhz or so. But the low volumes definitely hurt Motorola's ability to keep up with Intel's R&D. Clock for clock, the 68k architecture was faster, but Intel figured out how to throw a lot more clocks at the problem and they kept doing that until PowerPCs were not really a consumer-level home computer chip anymore.
digi_owl 12y ago
Proprietary chips. The IBM PC was basically off the shelf components bar the BIOS. And so when Compaq clean roomed said chip, it was a free for all. Especially as IBM was a old name in the corporate world, and so the PC had a foothold where the Amiga did not.
transfire 12y ago
Commodore's more significant mistake was as the article said "Commodore hedged their bets everywhere — except in the Amiga’s most obvious application as a game machine, from which they ran terrified." Which is the exact opposite of what they should have done. Instead they should have split their market into two, one focusing on high-end workstations and the other game and home computing. I remember when they were talking about the next generation of custom graphics chips and there was all of this hold up, which was so unnecessary because there was a simple solution. They only needed to add three of the same chip in one for each color red, blue and green or for controlling every third scan line (I had even read of someone doing this with three separate Amigas). There's your next gen workstation right there.
- the_rosentotter 12y ago
  > they should have split their market into two, one focusing on high-end workstations and the other game and home computing. That's exactly what they did (and very successfully), with the 500 and 2000 models. The main problem for mainstream adoption at the time was that the machine, being so successful as a multimedia and games machine, was regarded as a toy. But the stake through the heart of the Amiga, and all the other proprietary platforms of the time, was that the IBM PC architecture became a standard that was open for all manufacturers to produce for. You can't compete with that. (Unless you are Steve Jobs. In fact the accepted wisdom at the time, with Apple and the Mac teetering on the brink of annihilation, was that they should open up their hardware platform and become a software company.)
  - mtviewdave 12y ago
    >That's exactly what they did (and very successfully), with the 500 and 2000 models. I'd argue that while the 500 was what they needed, the 2000 was quite unambitious. What Amiga really needed in their 1987 high-end product was a 14MHz 68020 (or EC020) based, 32-bit system, with a graphics chipset to match. Take the old chipset, but give it 2x the clock and 2x the memory bandwidth, and all sorts of things (including non-interlaced 8-bit 640x400 video) become possible. If they had started working on this in late 1985, I think they would have had a chance at being taken more seriously. Instead, they didn't even start revising the chipset until 1988, and they didn't have a native 32-bit based system until the 3000 in 1990 (and even then, still with the old chipset). In fairness, I understand the US-based side of Commodore was thinking along these lines for the 2000, but lost out to the Commodore German division's model of a cheaper 1000 with slots and a better case. What Apple proved was that an alternative to the PC was possible, if you were clever enough in your technology and your marketing. Commodore was neither.

I'm still wondering why the Amiga didn't become ubiquitous. I had one and I kept getting called a liar about its price - for the performance compared to PCs of the time, surely I omitted a zero.

ido 12y ago

Some of it is in the article. Like Atari with the ST, Commodore basically failed to capitalize on the original amiga and by the early 90s PCs have mostly caught up. While the amiga 1000 was revolutionary in 1985, AGA[1] was not that special in 1992 (especially as it wasn't particularly beneficial to 3d games like doom, which were becoming the new hotstuff). The amiga of the 90s was the 3dfx voodoo. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Advanced_Graphics_Architecture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Advanced_Graphics_Archite...

Gracana 12y ago
If anyone is interested, Stuart Brown's "Doomed: The Embers of Amiga FPS" is a nice little documentary of the history mentioned above. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tv6aJRGpz_A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tv6aJRGpz_A
cmrdporcupine 12y ago
And frankly by the late 80s the 680000 architecture itself had hit a dead end performance wise. Maybe Motorola could have pulled off what Intel did with Pentium, paper over the aging CISC with RISC internals, but instead we got PowerPC. I'm not sure if you ever used a PowerPC Mac when they were a mix of emulated 68k and PowerPC, but they were notoriously unstable. The mix of a lack of memory protection and emulated CPU instructions would have been the same for the Amiga and Atari ST whose OSs also lacked memory protection and safety features of more modern operating systems. I have an Atari Falcon 030, Atari's last and best machine. It is a really really nice machine. But it was hobbled by poor software support -- it's only now that hackers are discovering what they can do with the combination of the 68030 and the Motorola 56k DSP in it (Example: Quake 3 has been ported/rewritten recently for it, using the 56k for 3d acceleration.) I used to wonder what the world would have been like if the 68000 systems won out. But now we're seeing a world where the ARM belatedly wins out, which is kind of neat, tho ARM is arguably now as "evil" as Intel :-) What is an interesting mental exercise is imagining what would have happened if the 6502 or 6809 architectures had expanded and done well. Those architectures had insanely fast interrupt processing and very fast (single CPU cycle) memory access. Some really neat machines could have been made if they'd continued to advance them, gotten past the 64k memory address limit and into high clock rates. Western Design stopped at the 65c816, a 16-bit variant of the 6502. Something faster and funner than the Amiga could have been built with a 32-bit 6502 descendant and chipsets similar to what was in the Amiga. That would have been really neat.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- userbinator 12y ago
  Maybe Motorola could have pulled off what Intel did with Pentium, paper over the aging CISC with RISC internals, but instead we got PowerPC. I think one of the factors could be that 68k is a bit harder to decode than x86 - while the instruction set is more orthogonal, the encoding has less structure; compare http://goldencrystal.free.fr/M68kOpcodes.pdf http://goldencrystal.free.fr/M68kOpcodes.pdf (68k) with http://i.stack.imgur.com/07zKL.png http://i.stack.imgur.com/07zKL.png (x86). very fast (single CPU cycle) memory access That was possible only because at the time, memory was faster than the core and could keep up. Modern CPUs run the core at several times memory speeds, and there is latency involved due to physical constraints.
  - digi_owl 12y ago
    Yep. The one thing Intel frets over these days is cache misses. Hyperthreading is all about keeping that pipeline busy even if the original thread encounter a cache miss.
  - ghostberry 12y ago
    One difference between Motorola and Intel, is Motorola was less concerned with breaking backwards compatibility. If the 68k family had continued to evolve past the 1994s 68060, I'm sure they could have just dropped backwards compatibility to some of the more complex addressing modes, or just devoted less silicon to them, and making what remains faster. Kinda like happened with the ColdFire version of the 68k family.
    - rbanffy 12y ago
      The not-implemented instruction trapping in the 68K could be easily evolved to cover less frequently used instructions to make room for more optimized implementations of the frequently used ones. What really killed the 68000 was the move to RISC, in particular Apple's move to PowerPC. That took away any hope of future evolution (they even managed to release the 68060 after that, but that was it) and collapsed the high-end 68K business.
indymike 12y ago
It's really hard to give people from this generation a sense of how fast things advanced and how big the leaps were in the 80s and early 90s. We went from 8 bit to multimedia 32 bit in less than 10 years. For devs it was a new box every year or two. Sometimes two new computers in a year. My first 386 dev box was purchased in 1987. Within a year of that, I was using a Compaq portable 386 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_Portable_386 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_Portable_386). 386 was a big deal because it finally got us Intel devs a flat address space... so no more trying to fit data into tiny pages (64k). 386 killed the chief advantage of 68k architecture, and for whatever reason Motorola just couldn't get the clock speed up fast enough. There were two things that were interesting about the Amiga in 87: video toaster for doing cheap video effects (think intro sequence to Better Call Saul, not awesome demos) and gaming. But gaming on the PC made a huge leap in 1987 when IBM shipped ALL of their new PS/2 computers with a 256 color video adapter called the VGA (seem to remember the lowest end models only doing 256 colors in 320x260 mode... but that was good enough)... Eventually TrueVision and even ATI had video cards that could do the same sorts of things (or better) than an Amiga. So many great computer ideas died in the 80s and early 90s... but it was really evolution... most of them died because a generalized solution (i.e. VGA with video out + software) eclipsed a specialized solution (i.e. Amiga with video toaster).
- yuhong 12y ago
  AFAIK the lowest end was called MCGA.

bobochan 12y ago

The articles nails it talking about the distribution channels. The small shops that were selling Apples and Ataris refused to carry Commodore computers when they started selling VIC-20s and C-64s at big box stores like Toys R Us. When Commodore had a more powerful, and expensive, computer available, it was too expensive for those stores and they could not support it.

digi_owl 12y ago
Well those small shops, especially if they carried Apple, probably knew not to offend. Apple was no better to stores than MS was/is to OEMs.
- vidarh 12y ago
  Commodore outsold Apple on the low end by a large factor for many years (and continued to do so in terms of units on a worldwide basis pretty much to the bitter end). They'd have continued to support Commodore if Commodore didn't continuously mess them around. A major factor was the price war that was to be Jack Tramiel's parting shot: Commodore overnight announced a massive price drop and left their dealers to take the hit on all inventory they already had on hand. That was typical for Tramiel playing hard-ball but also severely hurt a lot of businesses that had bet on Commodore. You see the difference when you look at the US market vs. Europe - Europe was handled by subsidiaries that often handled their dealer networks far better. Particularly the UK and Germany were Commodore strongholds. The UK subsidiary actually tried to get financing for a buyout of Commodore International after the bankruptcy, and survived for quite a while on their own financial strength.

pyb 12y ago

They did become ubiquitous, but not in the United States.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

bane 12y ago

My parents insisted on buying a PC for home use. It was mainly so they could do accounting for their business at home. I had a friend who had an Amiga and I spent pretty much as much time as possible at their house using it. We even had an Amiga only store in our local mall (in the U.S.!). I think that, in the way that Apple products are now showing up in work places due to people preferring them at home. The reverse happened in the 90s. People wanted or needed to bring work home, and their offices supplied them with PCs. The productivity situation on PCs was always just a bit better or standardized than Amigas. What mystified me more was that, during this time period, the Apple Macintosh took over the creative market -- especially in visual arts. The Amiga always came across to me as a far better creative machine, with better tooling, than the stuffier Mac. Again it may be due to better support for WYSIWYG output during printing and pre-press, better color matching etc. But the Amiga just felt more creative and fun to me. Also, by the time the 68040 came out, it was starting to become clear to everybody that Motorola wasn't going to be able to keep the performance edge up. Apple switched to PowerPC but Commodore couldn't afford to. There was a whole plethora of PowerPC cards for the Amiga, to try to keep them going, but it was really obvious by then that it was game over, and people started to hunt around for the next system.

jacquesm 12y ago
There never was a high volume machine that really used the '040 to its potential. The Next Cube was pretty good and there was an Alpha from DEC with it as well but that chip would have been a very nice one to have in a machine like the ST Falcon, in the end it was mostly heat (or powerconsumption if you wish) that killed it rather than that it didn't have the raw performance.
- bane 12y ago
  You might be right. I seem to recall that right around the time Intel released the 80486 they started getting into the Mhz wars and clock multiplying the hell out of everything. DX2 then DX4. The fastest 68040 maxed out at what...40Mhz, while the 486 ended up somewhere at 150Mhz or so. But the low volumes definitely hurt Motorola's ability to keep up with Intel's R&D. Clock for clock, the 68k architecture was faster, but Intel figured out how to throw a lot more clocks at the problem and they kept doing that until PowerPCs were not really a consumer-level home computer chip anymore.

digi_owl 12y ago

Proprietary chips. The IBM PC was basically off the shelf components bar the BIOS. And so when Compaq clean roomed said chip, it was a free for all. Especially as IBM was a old name in the corporate world, and so the PC had a foothold where the Amiga did not.

transfire 12y ago

Commodore's more significant mistake was as the article said "Commodore hedged their bets everywhere — except in the Amiga’s most obvious application as a game machine, from which they ran terrified." Which is the exact opposite of what they should have done. Instead they should have split their market into two, one focusing on high-end workstations and the other game and home computing. I remember when they were talking about the next generation of custom graphics chips and there was all of this hold up, which was so unnecessary because there was a simple solution. They only needed to add three of the same chip in one for each color red, blue and green or for controlling every third scan line (I had even read of someone doing this with three separate Amigas). There's your next gen workstation right there.

the_rosentotter 12y ago
> they should have split their market into two, one focusing on high-end workstations and the other game and home computing. That's exactly what they did (and very successfully), with the 500 and 2000 models. The main problem for mainstream adoption at the time was that the machine, being so successful as a multimedia and games machine, was regarded as a toy. But the stake through the heart of the Amiga, and all the other proprietary platforms of the time, was that the IBM PC architecture became a standard that was open for all manufacturers to produce for. You can't compete with that. (Unless you are Steve Jobs. In fact the accepted wisdom at the time, with Apple and the Mac teetering on the brink of annihilation, was that they should open up their hardware platform and become a software company.)
- mtviewdave 12y ago
  >That's exactly what they did (and very successfully), with the 500 and 2000 models. I'd argue that while the 500 was what they needed, the 2000 was quite unambitious. What Amiga really needed in their 1987 high-end product was a 14MHz 68020 (or EC020) based, 32-bit system, with a graphics chipset to match. Take the old chipset, but give it 2x the clock and 2x the memory bandwidth, and all sorts of things (including non-interlaced 8-bit 640x400 video) become possible. If they had started working on this in late 1985, I think they would have had a chance at being taken more seriously. Instead, they didn't even start revising the chipset until 1988, and they didn't have a native 32-bit based system until the 3000 in 1990 (and even then, still with the old chipset). In fairness, I understand the US-based side of Commodore was thinking along these lines for the 2000, but lost out to the Commodore German division's model of a cheaper 1000 with slots and a better case. What Apple proved was that an alternative to the PC was possible, if you were clever enough in your technology and your marketing. Commodore was neither.